Dosbox

By Wesley Regenbogen

About DOSBOX

If you were a teenager in real life in the 90s,you probably learned to work with MS-DOS and you had a few programs and games that you liked. With the Windows environment coming out back then, the MS-DOS era was almost done and in most cases you weren’t able to run those programs and games again. The more new versions of Windows came, the less of a chance that you were able to run those programs and games. With Windows 7, 8.1 and the upcoming Windows 10 ( which will be released at the end of 2015, probably ) you don’t have a MS-DOS command-line.

But don’t be afraid, DOSBOX is a program that allows you to run these programs and games like you used to do in MS-DOS. You can download the program at http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1 and install it. The current version, at the moment of writing this, is 0.74. The installation process is painless ( meaning : easy ) and you can use it directly.

Where do you download old games to use within DOSBOX ?

So, you are probably wondering, “Ok, so you got a program to use old programs and games with? But where do I get the games from, then?”

Well, I found a good website for that. It’s called “Best Old Games.net” and you can find it at http://www.bestoldgames.net/eng/. At the top of the site, you will find letters and if you click them, you get a list with games that are supported by DOSBOX. But, if you already know the game you are looking for, you can use the “search box” under the “Info” section of the site. You can also search games by category, under the “Games” section.

Should you encounter a problem, you can post it on their support forum as well, just click the “Best Old Games Support Forum” button.

Oh yes, I’m going to explain how to run and install programs and games later, but if you download games from the site, they are always in a .zip file format, you need to have a program to unzip them, like 7-Zip or WinZip or similar programs.

How to run a program or game under DOSBOX ?

So, you just downloaded a game on the website http://www.bestoldgames.net/eng/ and you downloaded the zip file and unzipped it with 7-Zip or a similar program. You need to extract it in a directory like C:\DOSGAMES or a similar directory. You can close down the unzipping program. 

Then you click on the “Dosbox v0.74” icon on your desktop. The program opens up and you see a DOSBOX window appear with the “Z:\” in the command-line. You need to follow the instructions below to mount the directory you created earlier ( without the quote signs ) :

At the “Z:\” command-line you need to type the following to mount the drive and directory:

“Mount C C:\DOSGAMES”

You get this message in the command-line :

“Drive C is mounted as a local directory c:\dosgames”

You can use the command “dir/p” to view the contents of the directory.

To go to the directory of the games that you downloaded earlier, you need to type in the following :

“cd [NAME OF THE DIRECTORY]”

Then you go to the directory itself.

Then you need to type the command to run the game, that’s different from game to game, of course.

Some games need to be installed first.

You then need to run the SETUP or INSTALL command to run the setup.

In my opinion, this program is very well and runs smoothly. This is a great program and the site mentioned is one of the best sites to find old games and download them.

Wesley Regenbogen